Africa Is Slowly Creating a New Ocean Right Now – Part 2

The map of Africa will have a lot more blue in it

The crazy thing is, the split area is on a separate tectonic plate, so we’re not just talking about a new ocean, we might be talking about a new continent as well…. Maybe.

You see, the definition of continent is almost as confusing as the definition of an ocean, largely because we decided on what should be a continent before we really understood plate tectonics, and now we’re trying to make it all make sense.

If we go back to our friends at Merriam-Webster, they define a continent as, “one of the six or seven great divisions of land on the globe”. The new land mass resulting from this movement will be on its own tectonic plate separate from the rest of Africa, and as you can see from the visualization above, it will be a substantial land mass.

Whether it will officially be called a continent in its own right, we can’t say for sure; after all, Pluto was a planet, then it wasn’t, and we still haven’t moved past that…so let’s not place any bets just yet.